Why Can't You All Just Obey Me?

Musicians Should Stop Blaming Streaming for Lousy Sales

In the January 19, 2012, issue of Rolling Stone, there was a small sidebar article about how artists, specifically The Black Keys and Coldplay, have chosen not to have their latest albums available to stream on Spotify. The article (“The Black Keys, Coldplay Say No (For Now) to Spotify“; page 17) quotes The Black Keys guitarist, Dan Auerbach, as saying, “How is that good for musicians?” and, “We didn’t want it to impact our record sales.”

I’ve only recently even discovered The Black Keys. Want to know how I even tried giving them a listening to? On Spotify.

That’s right. Thanks to Spotify, the very service they’re proactively keeping their new music from is the very service that helped me come to love their music. It’s because of Spotify, that in the past three weeks alone, my household has purchased their two most recent releases, “El Camino”and“Brothers,”with a very good chance of me picking up any of their other five albums.

I’ve said it many times before, but musicians need to know that streaming music services isn’t what’s killing their record sales. Crappy music is killing their record sales (That’s right, I’m talking to you, too, AFI). I stream music all the time and when I find a song or CD that doesn’t totally suck, I’ll happily go and give them my money.

So please, musicians, focus on putting out awesome music and let us, your fans, worry about giving you our money. If you make it too difficult for current and potential fans to listen to your music, then we’ll just keep our money and go our separate ways.

Author Description

Daniel De Guia

Daniel is a writer from Sonoma County, California. In addition to that, he is a dad to three great kids, a geek, bookworm, blogger, fiction writer & gamer.
Connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. He also writes a health and fitness blog for fathers, called Fit To Be Dad, and is a contributing writer for The Good Men Project.

Jason Wilkins

You can be certain that it isn’t really the band that doesn’t want their records on streaming services. The record company is the one who loses out in that scenario. I can almost guarantee that the label is speaking through their artist like a puppet. The artist gets such a small percentage of profit from record sales, it’s a joke.

http://twitter.com/deguia Daniel De Guia

I’m sure in some cases it might the more a decision made by the record company. In the case of The Black Keys, it’s clearly the viewpoint of the band members. And I have a sneaky suspicion that a band that’s a much of a cash cow as Coldplay could do pretty much whatever they wanted and their label would just have to deal with it.

And to be clear, I’m not talking about illegal downloading, but streaming services like Grooveshark, Spotify and Pandora.

http://twitter.com/phredeye Fred Isaacs

As someone who’s operated an online streaming service and assisted with operating another, I can tell you that neither the band or the label is starving when people stream legally from the US/UK.

Trying to operate an online music service from the US without paying BMI/ASCAP fee’s will first get you a nasty cease and desist order from the RIAA’s lawyers followed by you being sued into the ground. Let me tell you that those fee’s are pricey enough to be categorized as “prohibitively expensive” for small / independent / non-profit broadcasters. (i.e. if you dont have megabucks, prepare to get raped)

IIRC Grooveshark is hosted outside of the continental US to avoid paying BMI/ASCAP fees. Pandora is SF Bay Area based and pays those fees by offering a “freemium” service. Spotify I have less knowledge about.
Either way, these guys are crying wolf big time. Streaming music is making them money hand over fist.

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